Now he had Harper. And they had Jeremy.
And everything was suddenly so much better.
Better, at least, as long as she meant the words. As long as she felt them.
He tried to relax his muscles, tried to convince himself that it was okay to believe that Harper loved him...and that he was worthy of her love. But it was hard going when the truth was that he hadn’t believed himself worthy since he was a kid.
“No one will ever love a little shit like you,” his father used to say. “Not unless you can figure out how to be faster and smarter and sneakier than everyone else. Then maybe you’ll be worth something.”
So that was what Will had done—he’d figured out how to be fast and smart and sneaky. It wasn’t until he’d finally come to trust Susan and Bob and the Mavericks that he’d figured out how to love. And of course he loved them with everything in him, even if he’d often wondered how they could possibly love a fast-handed, sneaky smartass like him.
Thankfully, the tension in his body didn’t wake Harper. She stayed right there in his arms, her skin like silk against his, her leg thrown over him, her foot between his calves. And bells were ringing.
No, not bells. His phone.
Unwilling to let her go, he fumbled around on the nightstand, finally feeling it beneath his fingers. “Hello.” Though his voice was low, it sounded sharp in the quiet room, with only Harper’s soft breaths breaking the silence.
“Mr. Franconi, it’s Benny.”
His driver Benny was shuttling Jeremy to and from work. In an instant, Will’s heart began to beat fast and out of rhythm. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find Jeremy.”
No.
Please no.
Harper was still asleep. Still oblivious. While Will’s lungs felt like they’d been flattened by a speeding, out of control car.
“He was supposed to be in front of the building,” Benny said, his voice fast, nervous. “That’s what we arranged. But he wasn’t there. And I couldn’t find him upstairs in the office. No one remembers seeing him after three o’clock.”
Will glanced at the bedside clock. It was five-thirty in the evening back in San Francisco. Which meant that Jeremy had been missing for over two hours. It took everything Will had to figure out how to take that breath he needed so desperately.
“Will?” Harper finally shifted, his name sleepy on her tongue.
She’d just told him she loved him...and now he had to tell her that he’d lost the most precious person in her life.
“Have you called the police?” he asked Benny, each word sharp and hard.
“No, sir, we looked everywhere we could think of and then I called you.”
“Call them. Now.”
Harper sat up. “Will.” Sleep was gone—terror had invaded. Utter terror.
“But sir,” Benny said, “they won’t look for missing persons until it’s been twenty-four hours.”
Will threw his legs over the edge of the bed, and planted them firmly on the floor. He clenched his teeth so hard, he thought they might crack. “Tell them he’s disabled.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will?”
Her strangled whisper damn near broke him in two. But he needed to finish. “And get Security to check every room, closet, bathroom, and stairwell in that building.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will.”
“Have your phone with you at all times. Call me back as soon as you have anything new.”
“Yes, sir.”
The need to roar, to blame Benny and everyone else back in San Francisco, clawed at his insides. But he managed to keep the phone in his hand instead of throwing it across the room. For Harper, he needed whatever cool he had left.
She’d stopped saying his name. He turned, just enough to see her. And, like a coward, he thanked God there wasn’t enough light coming through the windows to show him her full devastation as he told her, “Benny can’t find Jeremy. He wasn’t waiting outside when Benny arrived, and no one in the office knows where he is.”
She’d gone completely still, and he swore he could hear every single worry she was thinking. Every fear she was feeling. Because he was thinking and feeling all of them, too.
“You said he’d be safe.”
His guts twisted. What the hell have I done?
He reached back to turn on the light. He couldn’t keep hiding from her in the dark. “We’re going back. Now. I’ll call the flight crew. I’ll call the cops myself. And I know a good private detective. I’m on it.”
But that was a lie, because his nerves were on fire. Every inch of him, inside and out, burned with uselessness. Helplessness.
“How could he just disappear?”
Her question sounded so lost. She wasn’t crying, was showing no emotion at all. There was just a slackness in her features, as if everything had drained out of her.
Will had never hated himself as much as he did in that moment, watching Harper break. He’d broken her. And Jeremy, too. They’d been doing just fine until he came along, until he punched his way into their carefully constructed lives and upended everything.
“We’ll find him.” He wanted to touch her, but he couldn’t, didn’t deserve a touch, didn’t deserve to comfort her. He didn’t deserve those three sweet, beautiful, damning words she’d given him such a short time ago. All he had left were the meaningless sounds falling out of his mouth. “I promise.”
“You promise?”
If she’d yelled or screamed or thrown a lamp, maybe he could have pretended he hadn’t heard. But the low hush of her voice said it so much more clearly than her rage could have.
His promises meant nothing.
How could they, when he’d broken the most important one he’d ever made to her? He’d wanted her to come to London with him, so he’d come up with the plan, laid it out for her, convinced her.
And now he’d failed her, because he hadn’t kept Jeremy safe.
* * *
How could everything have gone so wrong in just twenty-four hours?
Harper was curled into a tight ball of stress in her seat as the jet flew out over the endless ocean. This time, there was no filet mignon, no mousse, no crystal, no china. No laughter. No talk.
And definitely no love.
She’d left Jeremy alone. She hadn’t called him to check in since they’d landed in London. God help her, the truth was that she’d barely even thought about him in almost twenty-four hours. And now he was gone.
What was happening to him right now?
Where was he?
Harper thought she might be sick right there in Will’s elegantly appointed lounge.
He was on his phone. He’d been on it almost constantly since they’d run out of his London flat. They’d slammed their bags shut, and whatever wasn’t in them got left behind. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was back in San Francisco. Somewhere.
God only knew where.
“Yes,” Will said, “he has a cell phone. Unfortunately, my driver found his jacket in a locker at the office with the phone in it.” Will listened to the person on the other end of the line and glanced at her. “Do you have any photos of Jeremy on your phone?”
“I didn’t bring it with me because I don’t have an international calling plan.” Her voice was hollow, but she couldn’t put any life into it. Not when she was so scared. “And I knew he had your number.”
These past few years, her job had been to figure out every single thing that could possibly go wrong for Jeremy, and then do whatever she needed to do to make sure it didn’t happen. But ever since she’d connected with Will, she’d taken her eye off the ball more and more. And now, for this trip, when she should have run through all the possibilities, all the things that could go wrong, she’d done the exact opposite. She’d let Will handle the details for her brother so that she could have fun in her sexy fantasyland.
“I’ve got a couple of pictures I can send,” he said to his caller, “but we were working on a car, and he’s not looking straight at the camera.” He paused. “Yeah. Sure. As soon as I hang up.”
They’d taken off half an hour ago, after Will had awakened the flight crew in the middle of the night and obtained clearance to fly within the hour. He had everyone back in San Francisco looking for Jeremy—his staff, the police, the detective.
But he couldn’t change the fact that they had to sit on this plane for almost ten hours. While Jeremy was out there. Alone.
What if something terrible had happened to him?
What if she never saw her brother again?
“Anything to report?” Will had his phone to his ear again as he signaled the steward, pointing at the coffee service on the sideboard and miming that the man should pour a cup for Harper. Even now, Will was taking care of her, taking care of everything.
“Call the minute you hear anything, find anything.”
She wanted to blame him. For making her come to London. For taking Jeremy out of the grocery store and into that job up in the city. She wanted to scream at him, shout that it was all his fault. If he’d never come into their lives, if he hadn’t seduced Jeremy with his cars and his friendship, if he hadn’t touched her, everything would have been fine. Had she been able to make the blame stick, she’d have done it in a heartbeat. She needed someone else to condemn so badly that she felt bile push up from her stomach.